Meals Made Easy
UX Research / UX | UI Design | Usability Tests
(View on mobile)
Project Background
Frequent food delivery app usage often results in stress, procrastination, and higher expenses compared to cooking at home. Despite the popularity of meal kit services, cost remains a significant barrier. With a growing interest in home cooking, simpler meal-planning solutions are necessary to foster healthier habits and cost savings.
Team
Mabel Teng -Product Manager
Jesse Brault - Developer
Me - Product Designer
Tools
Figma, Trello
UX Methods
User testing , Prototyping , Style Sheet
View the case study here
Solution
Meals Made Easy is a progressive web application that organizes your end-to-end meal planning process from customizing Personalized Preferences, Recipe Browsing to Building a Calendar Planner.
Key Features
Personalized Preferences
You will be able to personalize your meal choices based on your desired cooking time, diet preferences, and food intolerances.
Meal Selection
The meal choices are generated based on your pre-selected preferences. Currently, the meal choices are extracted from the API, Spoonacular, which provides access to more than 10,000 recipes online.
Recipe Browsing
The recipe book provides a list of ingredients and instructions of your selected meal. You can add a recipe onto the meal planner by choosing a meal type and date.
Calendar Planner
Provides an overview of your meals chosen for the week. You are also able to add, delete, or change the recipes selected.
Defining the Problem
How Might We ...
address the user's problem?
Market Research
Restaurant delivered meals are 5X as expensive as homemade meals
Meal kit delivery services are 2X as expensive as homecooked food.
54%
51%
Pandemic has re-sparked a joy in cooking for Americans.
Americans have indicated that they prefer to cook more at home post pandemic.
User Research
We learned that most people plan 1-6 meals each week, diving deeper into our user interviews, we identified some common themes that influence their meal planning process and most of them struggle with:
Ideation
Creating a Persona helped me understand who my user is, to acknowledge that different people have different requirements and expectations.
Brain Storming
I sent up a collaborative session with my PM & Developer to understand the personas to center the solutions around the users and our data.The mission of the product is to help individuals focus on other areas of their lives without worrying about planning what they want to eat.Our hypothesis is that if we provide an end-to-end solution that simplifies their meal planning process, it will:
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Prevent decision fatigue - It stops people from stressing out and procrastinating when deciding what to eat amidst their busy schedules since meals are planned.
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Promote variety and a healthier lifestyle - It enables variety that not only meets your nutrient needs but also gives you more control over what you are eating, thus encouraging a healthier lifestyle.​
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Save money - Not only does it reduce the temptation to impulse purchase takeout food, but you are also able to avoid waste since you are planning meals ahead of time..
Journey Map
Existing
To Be
Story Board
Low Fi Mock ups
Mid Fi Mock ups
After getting feedback from my mentor and understanding the constraints from the developer, I started to build more detailed Mid- fi wireframes for my first round of testing.
User Testing
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After getting feedback from my mentor and understanding the constraints from the developer,I started to build more detailed Mid- fi wireframes for my first round of testing.
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Findings
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The design resulted in a 95% average task completion rate of adding a particular recipe to their meal
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Participants had a positive experience completing the tasks.
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Users were confused about the category tab.
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Users felt the process was long.
Challenges
While I was conducting user testing, our developer was working on getting an API at a minimum cost. Only once we had access to the API, we were able to get more clarity on the limitations we might have. Building a search engine was not possible due to technical constraints, So I had to redesign my screens making sure the app was intuitive enough for something to navigate through the app without reaching the search bar.
Hi Fi Mock ups
What's Next?
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Up next, I plan to run another round of usability tests to measure task completion rate and user satisfaction. By increasing user satisfaction and credibility, usage should increase and help advocate for the product I will also be coordinating with the developers to more accurately reflect the designs across the different screen sizes.
Learnings
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I got to learn by doing, trying, and finding solutions to specific problems. To design following inclusive design principles and deeper knowledge of accessibility.
How to prioritize, pivot, and adjust constantly to release an MVP within a short deadline.
Collaborate with teammates with different skill sets and expertise.
Working in an Agile setting.More knowledge about Figma having used it extensively.